Press Release

Summing It Up at the End: Alberto Giacometti's 45 Drawings Portfolio

JANUARY 19, 2017

Summing It Up In the End: Alberto Giacometti’s “45 Drawings” Portfolio Debuts at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art

January 20 – June 5, 2017

(Charlotte, NC) – A portfolio of 45 photogravure copies of drawings by Alberto Giacometti will be on view at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, January 20 to June 5, 2017. 45 Drawings by Alberto Giacometti (Quarantacinque disegni di Alberto Giacometti) is a collection that reproduced selected sketches made over the course of Giacometti’s career, from the beginning of his art training up to the portfolio’s publication, defining his artistic legacy for future generations.

In November 1963, nine months after his surgery, Giacometti printed a portfolio entitled 45 Drawings. It was as if Giacometti sought to retrace all his explorations and developments as an artist and then, to preserve them for eternity, defining his artistic legacy for future generations of scholars, collectors and students. In this portfolio, we see an artist reckoning with his mortality, his life's work and the inevitable process of letting go, a beautiful and poignant love letter to the creative process.

To create the prints, Giacometti implemented the infrequently used photogravure process, a combination of photography and traditional intaglio printmaking, that's combined the traditional with the avant-garde, an apt mirroring of Giacometti's approach to representation, where to formal tradition of portraiture converged with the philosophical influences and experimentations of his time.

The process allowed Giacometti and his editor, Lamberto Vitali, to distribute this visual timeline, the developmental arc of Giacometti's distinctive aesthetic, to a wide variety of museums and collectors, allowing them to live beyond the limited audiences they found in the private collections that owned the originals. It also emphasized the importance of this body of work as an academic exercise - necessary to understand Giacometti the artist - while not compromising the originality of the drawings.

ABOUT THE BECHTLER MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art is dedicated to the exhibition of mid-20th-century modern art. It is named after the family of Andreas Bechtler who assembled and inherited a collection created by seminal figures of modernism. The museum is located at Levine Center for the Arts, 420 South Tryon Street, Charlotte 28202. Operating hours are Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.; Sunday 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.; closed Tuesdays. For museum details visit bechtler.org.

ARTWORK IMAGES: Artwork images from Summing It Up In the End: Alberto Giacometti’s 45 Drawings Portfolio are available upon request. Contact, Sharon Holm, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art Director of Marketing and Communications at sharon.holm@bechtler.org or office 704.353.9204 / mobile 704.975.2363.